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Solution to the Military’s Anti-Christian Crusade: Leave in Droves

September 9, 2013

Fox News published a piece last week which told the story of 19 year old Senior Master Sgt. Phillip Monk and the opposition he faced when asked to express his beliefs on homosexuality at his Air Force base. Fox News Columnist Todd Starnes writes:

After he [Monk] was relieved of his duties, the Liberty Institute filed a religious discrimination complaint on his behalf.

Last week, Monk was supposed to meet with an Air Force investigator tasked with gathering facts about the complaint. But when he arrived, Monk was immediately read his Miranda Rights and accused of providing false statements in a conversation Monk had with me.

One should not expect the situation to become easier for Christians from here on out. The war on individual liberty eventually becomes a war on the foundation of individual liberty: Christianity, especially Protestant Christianity (perhaps this is redundant). The homosexual agenda is not one which simply aims for a peaceful coexistence, or a “mutual tolerance” as they would like to claim. Rather, the LGBT movement aims to cut out traditional marriage, traditional family, at its very root. It demands a monopoly on the viewpoint of marriage and relationship. To disagree is to commit a crime. And crimes as they define them must always be intensely punished according to these statists.

The article continues to read:

And he’s [Monk] not the only Christian at Lackland Air Force Base facing persecution for opposing gay marriage, according to Monk’s pastor.

Steve Branson is the pastor of Village Parkway Baptist Church, about five miles from the Air Force base. He tells me that as many as a half dozen of his church members are currently facing persecution on the base for their religious beliefs.

“Sgt. Monk is just the tip of the iceberg,” the pastor tells me. “Anyone who doesn’t hold to the right view on homosexuality is having a very difficult time.”

Branson said one colonel is not even allowed to voice an opinion on the matter over fears it might cost him his job. Another airman has been brought up on charges eight times.

Christians are under attack, the pastor warned – and Lackland Air Force Base seems to be ground zero.

Christians are under attack. But should we expect anything else? Since the time of Christ, the message of the Truth has been a minority position. The object of our faith, Christ Himself was crucified, murdered. And in John 15:18-19 he said, “If the world hates you, know that it has hated me before it hated you. If you were of the world, the world would love you as its own; but because you are not of this world, but I chose you out of the world, therefore the world hates you.” Only in pre-21st century America has the belief system of Christianity been socially tolerable. This is an anomaly. Usually, the Christians are a small and despised number compared to the rest of a culture. The blessings of a religiously rich society though cannot last forever. Indeed it began to fade away in the time of Machen and his battle against liberalism. It is in this decade though that the effects are beginning to be seen. The world hates Christianity and turns from the truth.

What, then, should be done in situations like those revealed in the article? It is to the great demise of Christianity that many so-called Christian leaders have put such ill-founded faith in the State’s functions. It was the opinion of many American Christians until the great expansion of the military in the Cold War era that nothing the government does should be trusted. The government is dangerous to liberty, indeed the government is the opposite of liberty and wherever it sits, liberty is not to be found. Unfortunately, the military was seen as an exception to this tendency. The military was made a god in the hearts of many Church goers. They now sing songs to the state and its flag, dedicate special prayers to its members, and honor it in ways that Churches in the pre-Machen era would find disturbing. The military became a false god for the Christians.

But it is the opinion of the Christian libertarian that the single most dangerous function of the current State, indeed states of all time, is the military that it uses to expand its empire. Randolph Bourne wisely noted in a phrase that should never be seen as cliche, “War is the health of the State.” War and the military should be feared even more so than socialized medicine. The State does not use the military to “protect and serve” or to “defend the nation’s security” or to “ensure that justice is carried out.” On the contrary, the State’s military acts in such a way so as to make its victim’s beg God for justice to be done. It destroys lives and families and private property. It offends the world and endangers the American people, financially and physically. The state’s military is an idol that should be opposed, not worshiped.

As America expands her empire, Christians will indeed face the awful truth: that they fell for a false god. On a personal level, I am a recovering neocon. I have only been a libertarian for two years. It was humbling to realize that the military is a force to be spoken out against, not willfully funded and defended. That the military has so warmly embraced the LGBT movement agenda is a sign: get out. Stop worshiping the beast. No need to fight legal battles to state your rights in the military. The military itself is an abomination. Leave the military in droves. If you work for it, stand up for the Christian faith and leave. If you are considering working for it, don’t. If you don’t work for it but praise its activities, repent and do not look back.

The military is not there to protect your freedom. You must tell your children that it was your generation that allowed the military to take it away.

C.Jay Engel
Editor and creator of The Reformed Libertarian. Spends his day as an investment advisor and helping people with their financial strategies. Living in Northern California with his wife, he writes on everything from politics to theology and from culture to economic theory. You can send an email to reformedlibertarian@gmail.com

RA Jameson

Allow me to state, that I agree with the overall premise that the military should in fact be avoided by professing Christians. However, I am hardly sympathetic to Senior Master Sgt. Monk, who all of a sudden has decided to speak up about his Christian values, and now must pay his pound of flesh. Had Sgt. Monk read his Bible, he would know that he is not his own, but that he was bought with a price. Thus he does not have the authority to give his person to the United States Government to use at its pleasure. Under that pretense, no Christian could be allowed to join the military. But this guy, who takes his check from stolen goods (i.e. my taxes), and takes his pension from stolen goods, and travels around the world on stolen goods to attack people with stolen goods, as part of a fraternity that murders, rapes, and assaults-with stolen goods….NOW he wants to draw a moral line in the sand? All of the theft and murder and violence did not wake this guy up, NOOOOO-it was the gay guys that made him wake up. Great.

“Christians are under attack”-is the warning from the pastor. Well, yea. That is what the Lord promised. But this guy’s attack is self-inflicted. The Apostle Peter warned this guy, “But let none of you suffer as a murderer or a thief or an evildoer, or as a meddler.” So this guy wants to do all of the above, with the blessing of his beloved state/provider, then get upset when he disagrees with his beloved state/provider’s policy? There are words for this guy, but I shall refrain.

Homosexuality is a symptom, nothing more, nothing less. A symptom to the serious problem of not believing the very Word of God. Sgt. Monk should have read God’s word and NEVER enlisted. While he and his friends are out murdering, he wants to preach against the woes of being gay. No thanks Monk, pull the plank out of your own eye.

Could you imagine the Apostle Paul preaching against gay marriage? Ridiculous. In fact, he basically says the opposite-he does not judge the sexually immoral that abide OUTSIDE of the church. Why? Because he knows that they are showing symptoms of their real, very serious disease-God Hatred. And that is the disease that the Apostle Paul was interested in curing. So while Sgt. Monk is finally getting the courage to speak out about something, the Apostle Paul has been speaking to the real issue. Perhaps, if Monk opened his Bible more and watched Fox News less, he could have been out curing diseases instead of calling out symptoms.

Thanks, Mr. Engel, for another wonderful article :-), even if I do disagree with you at times (such as on dispensationalism, Calvinism, and revolution, the last of which I still think of replying to you on).

Now, I would like to note that while the LGBT people for the most part aren’t libertarians, there are many that don’t want to go as far as to destroy the liberty of others in pursuit of their own. Some in the LGBT movement are actually sincere libertarians who don’t like Christians due to the OFTEN statist nature of the religious right wing. The libertarian wing of the LGBT movement, as much as i may disagree with the positive outlook toward homosexuality, is right in supporting liberty for so-called “marriages.” They actually mean it when they talk about mutual tolerance and co-existence, albeit misguided in their celebration of homosexuality itself rather than the freedom from state coercion in this issue.

As to the start of Christian faith in the military, as Andrew Bacevich points out in THE NEW AMERICAN MILITARISM, many Christians started trusting in the military as a bastion of morality and traditional values during the Vietnam War, where many anti-Vietnam War folks began adopting libertine values; Bacevich also shows the role that the highly-praised Billy Graham had in this. Bacevich says, “Some evangelicals looked to the armed services to play a pivotal role in saving America from internal collapse. In a decadent and morally confused time, they came to celebrate the military itself as a bastion of the values required to stem the nation’s slide toward perdition: respect for tradition, an appreciation for order and discipline, and a willingness to sacrifice self for the common good. In short, evangelicals looked to soldiers to model the personal qualities that citizens at large needed to rediscover if America were to reverse the tide of godlessness and social decay to which the 1960s had given impetus.”

Anyways, in your two years when you were a libertarian, did you have any doubts on the compatibility of your faith and your libertarianism during that two-year period, and did you once consider going back to neoconservatism?

Thanks for the article. Keep up the good work 😀

cjayengel

Thanks Anand. I hope to have a pretty good post on Calvinism up this week –this site needs some more theology content.

Anyways, per your question, I never considered going back to neoconservatism. I also never doubted that the two views were compatible. But it was not until I started really getting into Presuppositionalist philosophy and apologetics that I realized my libertarianism ultimately depended on my Christian faith.